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I think its unappreciated just how dangerous stories are. it can lead people to believe many untrue things, which causes many societal issues. Maybe we are biased from our days where if you didn't listen to your ancestors by the fire, then you would be eaten by wolves. I think we're over-tuned and assign a higher truth value to stories we are told. The only way to fight this is to gain a rationalist mindset to fight back against our inherent biases (aka brain malfunctions), but rationalists seems to be on a decline these days. Asking for evidence is *not cool*, what is cool is believing every and anything people tell you 🙄 Make skepticism cool again. #lesswrong

Replies (36)

Something I have come to appreciate though is how stories can relay a set of heuristic moral principles that can be generally good to follow. Some people aren’t inclined to put the work in to dig all the way down to try and seek the moral first principles like yourself. Just my 2 Sats.
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↩ replying to npub1mewn...hq8d
That way lies madness. "Everything is a lie"? So what, nothing's real unless you see it yourself? The moon might be made of cheese, and Australia doesn't exist unless you've visited. But of course, you don't "actually" think that... Because if you seriously believed that you couldn't operate in the world, you'd be a raving lunatic pooping pants on the street. So it's all just a front.
↩ replying to Globe99
The context was stories. Once something has been proven true it is no longer just a story. Billions of things have already been proven true including that the moon is not made out of cheese. You can build on established truth rather than believe whatever new narrative some “authority” is pushing. Haven’t pooped my pants for more than 50yrs. Might start again in the next 30yrs, who knows.
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One of @rabble 's recent podcast guests was making an interesting point that some of the original objections to the printing press, aside from the loss of control of the Papacy as the sole source of Truth, was that trust moved from social networks to intellectual authorities. E.g. "I've been buying cheese from Jörg at the market for 10 years, I trust him more than some pamphlet saying the Plague is coming." The advent of social media, for better or worse, has sort of reversed this dynamic.
the bible call for us to believe what God said without any proof just because he said it. the bible calls it faith Then he said, "I tell you the truth, unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven. Matthew 18:3
It’s not necessary to convince people to be skeptical or rational, it’s enough to show the results of living that way. Trying to persuade others is always misguided; they’ll understand only when they experience the pain themselves.
You are touching on a wider/more meta problem. I think it is the whole conditioning of forcing acceptance of BS narratives and how it perverts the mindset/mental framework of people against their own natural rationality. Once their broken or brainwashed enough, the mind somehow shifts into hold onto this fear based narrative defensiveness.